Revision as of 04:10, 9 September 2005

The goal of NeoOffice/J is to provide an entirely free and complete Mac OS X office suite based on the international OpenOffice.org project—only with the look-and-feel you'd expect from any Macintosh application.

The OpenOffice.org project is a large open-source effort to create the ultimate office "suite" including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing software, and much more. With OpenOffice.org, you can easily import, edit, and exchange files with users of other office programs, such as Microsoft Office or WordPerfect.

While OpenOffice.org is developed primarily for Windows and Unix systems and has a user-interface geared for those operating systems, NeoOffice/J has made tremendous breakthoughs in offering the same to Macintosh users and making it look just like a Mac application!

How does it do this? Get ready for a pretty technical explanation—NeoOffice/J adapts OpenOffice.org code that uses the X11 windowing system and it then takes advantage of Mac OS X's cool Java integration to tap into the traditional Macintosh user-interface elements. The result? An office experience that feels like any other application on your Mac.

At least that's the goal. At present (June 2005), NeoOffice/J has integrated dozens of native Mac features, including a Mac installer, native menus in the white bar at the top of the screen, native print dialog box and printing, Mac-like keyboad shortcuts, mouse scrolling, a double-clickable application, access to all your Mac fonts, and much, much more! It's probably localized into your native language, too.

Best of all, NeoOffice/J is already remarkably stable at version 1.1. Thousands of people and organizations use NeoOffice/J to do their daily work!

Here's a caveat though—while NeoOffice/J is quite stable and feature-complete, it has not entirely adopted the Mac look-and-feel. There are still some bits of the old Windows/Unix interface in there. For example, the scroll bars do not have the familiar blue Aqua rounded look. The dialog boxes and "widgets" like check boxes and radio buttons are not the gorgeous Apple versions you're used to seeing. And the file chooser may look unfamiliar.

We're working on all this. Slowly but surely, and with your help, NeoOffice/J is moving closer and closer to being indistinguishable from any other Macintosh application. Patches are being released constantly that replace an old Windows/Unix-feature with a nice shiny Mac one.

So if you think $300+ is a bit much to pay for an office suite, we encourage you to try NeoOffice/J for free and let us know what you think. There's no catch—like its parent, OpenOffice.org, downloading and using NeoOffice/J doesn't cost a penny. Copy it as many times as you wish.

All we ask is that you report any bugs you find so they can be fixed. If you are a developer, we'd love to have your code. Or, if you are willing and able to support the development effort via a monetary donation, your contribution will be very much appreciated. You can do so via Paypal at the NeoOffice/J web site.

At present, there are very few NeoOffice/J developers, so every contribution helps.